


"The Rocket Man" Revisited

by mothpuppies



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: M/M, Old Married Spirk Challenge, Parenthood, Rewrite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-20
Updated: 2016-07-20
Packaged: 2018-07-25 17:22:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7541413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mothpuppies/pseuds/mothpuppies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Based on the original story "The Rocket Man" by Ray Bradbury, which was published in 1951. I have reworded/reworked small parts of the story to make it fit a Kirk/Spock narrative, but otherwise the story remains wholly Bradbury's. I mean no disrespect  and claim no credit for this story - my small edits are solely for entertainment purposes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	"The Rocket Man" Revisited

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Rocket Man](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/214477) by Ray Bradbury. 



> This story is told from the point of view of Spock and Jim's son, named "Christopher" after Captain Pike. 
> 
> "Father" is Spock. "Papa" is Jim. 
> 
> If you enjoyed the premise of the original story, I urge you to read some of Bradbury's collection of sci-fi short stories, such as "The Illustrated Man" or "A Sound of Thunder."

The electrical fireflies were hovering above Father's dark hair to light his path. He stood in his bedroom door looking out at me as I passed in the silent hall. "Will you help me keep him here this time?" he asked.

"I'll try," I said.

"That would please me." The fireflies cast moving bits of light on his white face. "I desire for him to stay."

"All right," I said, after standing there a moment. "But you know it won't do any good; it's no use."

Father went away, and the fireflies, on their electric circuits, fluttered after him like an errant constellation, showing him how to walk in darkness. I heard him say, faintly, "We have to try."

Other fireflies followed me to my room. When the weight of my body cut a circuit in the bed, the fireflies winked out. It was midnight, and Father and I waited, our rooms separated by darkness, in bed. The bed began to rock me and sing to me. I touched a switch; the singing and rocking stopped. I didn't want to sleep. I didn't want to sleep at all.

This night was no different from a thousand others in our time. We would wake nights and feel the cool air turn hot, feel the fire in the wind, or see the walls burn a bright color for an instant, and then we knew his Starship was over our house--his Starship, and the oak trees swaying from the concussion. And I would lie there, eyes wide, panting, and Father would stir in his room. His steady voice would come to me over the interroom radio: "Did you hear that?"

And I would answer, "That was him, all right."

That was my Papa's ship passing over our town, a small town where Starships never came, and I would lie awake for the next two hours, thinking, "Now Papa's landed in Springfield, now he's on the tarmac, now he's signing the papers, now he's in the shuttle, now he's over the river, now the hills, now he's settling the shuttle in at the little airport at Green Village here..."

And the night would be half over when, in our separate cool beds, Father and I would be listening, listening. "Now he's walking down Bell Street. He always walks... never takes a cab... now across the park, now turning the corner of Oakhurst, and now..."

I lifted my head from my pillow. Far down the street, coming closer and closer, smartly, quickly, brisk footsteps. Now turning in at our house, up the porch steps. And then we were both smiling in the cool darkness. Father's smile would be restrained, I knew, barely there, but it showed in the crinkles of his eyes, which mostly appeared when Papa was with us. But tonight we were both smiling, Father and I, when we heard the front door open in recognition, speak a quiet word of welcome, and shut, downstairs...

Three hours later I turned the brass knob to their room quietly, holding my breath, balancing in a darkness as big as the space between the planets, my hand out to reach the small black case at the foot of my sleeping parents' bed. Taking it, I ran silently to my room, thinking, Papa won't tell me about it, he doesn't want me to know.

And from the opened case spilled Papa's black and golden uniform, like a nebula, stars glittering here or there, distantly, in the material. I kneaded the dark stuff in my warm hands; I smelled the planet Mars, an iron smell, and the planet Genesis, a green ivy smell, and the planet Vulcan, a scent of sulphur and fire; and I could smell the milky moons and the hardness of stars. I pushed the uniform into a centrifuge machine I'd built in my ninth-grade shop that year, set it whirling. Soon a fine powder precipitated into a retort. This I slid under Father's microscope. And while my parents slept unaware, and while our house was asleep, all the automatic bakers and servers and robot cleaners in an electric slumber, I stared down upon brilliant motes of meteor dust, comet tail, and loam from far Jupiter glistening like worlds themselves which drew me down the tube a billion miles into space, at terrific accelerations.

At dawn, exhausted with my journey and fearful of discovery, I returned the boxed uniform to their sleeping room.

Then I slept, only to waken at the sound of the horn of the dry-cleaning car which stopped in the yard below. They took the black uniform box with them. It's good I didn't wait, I thought. For the uniform would be back in an hour, clean of all its destiny and travel.

I slept again, with the little vial of magical dust in my pajama pocket, over my beating heart.

When I came downstairs, there was Papa at the breakfast table, biting into his toast. "Sleep well, Chris?" he said, as if he had been here all the time, and hadn't been gone for three months.

"All right," I said.

"Toast?"

He pressed a button and the breakfast table made me four pieces, golden brown. I smiled when he handed them to me--their color matched his hair.

I remember my Papa that afternoon, digging and digging in the garden, like an animal after something, it seemed. There he was with his long tanned arms moving swiftly, planting, tamping, fixing, cutting, pruning, his handsome face always down to the soil, his eyes always down to what he was doing, never up to the sky, never looking at me, or Father, even, unless we knelt with him to feel the earth soak up through the overalls at our knees, to put our hands into the black dirt and not look at the bright, crazy sky. Then he would glance to either side, to Father or me, and give us a gentle wink, and go on, bent down, face down, the sky staring at his back.

That night we sat on the mechanical porch swing which swung us and blew a wind upon us and sang to us. It was summer and moonlight and we had lemonade to drink, and we held the cold glasses in our hands, and Papa read the stereo-newspapers inserted into the special hat you put on your head and which turned the microscopic page in front of the magnifying lens if you blinked three times in succession. He smoked a cigar and told me about how it was when he was a boy in the year 2233. After a while he said, as he had always said, "Why aren't you out playing with your friends, Chris?"

I didn't say anything, but Father said, "He often does, on nights when you are not here."

Papa looked at me and then, for the first time that day, at the sky. Father always watched him when he glanced at the stars. The first day and night when he got home he wouldn't look at the sky much. I thought about him gardening and gardening so furiously, his face almost driven into the earth. But the second night he looked at the stars a little more. Father wasn't wary of the sky in the day so much, but it was the night stars that he wanted to turn off, and sometimes I could almost see him reaching for a switch in his mind, but never finding it. And by the third night maybe Papa would be out here on the porch until way after we were all ready for bed, and then I'd hear Father call him in, almost like he called me from the street at times. And then I would hear Papa fitting the electric-eye door lock in place, with a sigh. And the next morning at breakfast I'd glance down and see his little black case near his feet as he buttered his toast and Father slept late.

"Well, be seeing you, Chris," he'd say, and we'd shake hands.

"In about three months?"

"Right."

And he'd walk away down the street, not taking a shuttle, just walking with his uniform hidden in his small underarm case; he didn't want anyone to think he was vain about being a Starship captain.

Father would come out to eat breakfast, one piece of dry toast, about an hour later.

But now it was tonight, the first night, the good night, and he wasn't looking at the stars much at all.

"Let's go to the television carnival," I said.

"Fine," said Papa. Father gave me an approving look, and when Papa turned away, Father laid a hand on my shoulder briefly.

And we rushed off to town in a shuttle and took Papa through a thousand exhibits, to keep his face and head down with us and not looking anywhere else. And as we laughed at the funny things and looked serious at the serious ones, I thought, My Papa goes to Saturn and Delta Vega and Golana, but he never brings me presents. Other boys whose papas go into space bring back bits of ore from Axanar and hunks of black meteor or blue sand. But I have to get my own collection, trading from other boys, the Martian rocks and Tychian sands which filled my room, but about which Papa would never comment.

On occasion, I remembered, he brought something for Father. He planted some Vulcan sunflowers once in our yard, but after he was gone a month the sunflowers grew large. Father walked out one day and cut them all down. I pressed him that night at dinner, but he only told me that their rapid growth was overtaking our walkway, and that allowing them to continue to bloom would be illogical. 

Without thinking, as we paused at one of the three-dimensional exhibits, I asked Papa the question I always asked: "What's it like, out in space?"

Father shot me a paralyzing glance, but it was too late.

Papa stood there for a full half minute trying to find an answer, then he shrugged. "It's the best thing in a lifetime of best things." Then he caught himself. "Oh, it's really nothing at all. Routine. You wouldn't like it." He looked at me, apprehensively.

"But you always go back."

He waved this off, noncommittally. "Habit."

"Where're you going next?"

"I haven't decided yet. I'll think it over."

He always thought it over. Father told me that Papa was a highly sought-after captain so he could pick and choose to work where he liked. On the third night of his homecoming you could see him picking and choosing among the stars.

Father held me round the shoulders and moved us toward the carnival exit. "It is time to return home, Christopher."

It was still early when we got home. I wanted Papa to put on his uniform. I shouldn't have asked--it always made Father's face tighten, and sometimes he left the room--but I couldn't help myself. I kept nagging Papa, though he had always refused. I had never seen him in it, and at last he said, "Oh, all right."

We waited in the parlor while he went upstairs in the air flue. Father looked at me dully, as if he couldn't believe that his own son could do this to him. I glanced away. "I'm sorry," I said.

"You are not keeping your word," he reprimanded me faintly.

There was a whisper in the air flue a moment later. "Here I am," said Papa quietly.

We looked at him in his uniform. It was glossy black pants with a bright yellow shirt and silver insignia, and it looked as if someone had cut it from a nebula and a sun. It fit as close as a glove fits to a slender long hand, and it smelled like cool air and metal and space. It smelled of fire and time.

Papa stood, smiling awkwardly, in the center of the room.

"Turn around," said Father. His eyes were remote, looking at his husband.

When Papa was gone, Father never talked of him. He never said anything about anything but a new specimen he was studying or the condition of my neck and the need of a washcloth for it. Once he said the light was too strong at night.

"But there's no moon this week," I said.

"Starlight, then," he said. So I went to the store and bought him some darker, greener shades. As I lay in bed at night, I could hear him pull them down tight to the bottom of the windows. It made a long rustling noise.

Once I tried to mow the lawn. "No." Father stood in the door. "Put the mower away. You should be studying instead." So the grass went three months at a time without cutting, and Papa cut it when he came home.

Father wouldn't let me do anything else either, like repairing the electrical breakfast maker or the mechanical book reader. He saved everything up, as if for Christmas. And then I would see Papa hammering or tinkering, and Father would sit with him and they would share their amiable banter. Sometimes, Father even let slip a smile. In those instances, Father was something he rarely ever is: happy.

No, he never talked of Papa when he was gone. And as for Papa, he never did anything to make a contact across the millions of miles. He said once, "If I called you, I'd want to be with you. I wouldn't be happy."

Once Papa said to me, "Your Father treats me, sometimes, as if I weren't here--as if I were invisible."

I had seen him do it. He would look just beyond Papa, over his shoulder, at his chin or hands, but never into his eyes. If he did look at his eyes, Father's eyes were covered with a film, like an animal going to sleep. He said yes at the right times, and nodded, but always a half second later than expected.

"Sometimes, I just ... I worry I'm not there for him," said Papa.

But other days he would be there and Papa was there for him, and they would walk around the block arm-in-arm, or take rides, with Father's dark hair slightly ruffled from the breeze, and he would cut off all the mechanical devices in the kitchen and bake Papa incredible cakes and pies and cookies, looking deep into his face, his attention ringing true and clear. But at the end of such days when Papa was there for him, Father would withdraw into himself with incredible force. He would lock their bedroom door and meditate alone for hours. And Papa would stand helpless on the other side of the door, gazing at the wood grain as if to find an answer, but never finding it.

Papa turned slowly, in his uniform, for us to see.

"Turn around again," said Father, not really seeing.

The next morning Papa came rushing into the house with handfuls of tickets. Pink rocket tickets for California, blue tickets for Mexico. "Come on!" he said. "Look, we take the noon rocket to L. A., the two-o'clock shuttle to Santa Barbara, the nine-o'clock plane to Ensenada, and sleep overnight!" When his plans were successful, he stood so tall and dashing and bold, and I was proud to be a Kirk.

So we went to California and up and down the Pacific Coast for a day and a half, settling at last on the sands of Malibu to cook veggie-grillers and hotdogs at night. Papa was always listening or singing or watching things on all sides of him, holding onto things as if the world were a centrifuge going so swiftly that he might be flung off away from us at any instant.

The last afternoon at Malibu Father was up in the hotel room. Papa lay on the sand beside me for a long time in the hot sun. "Ah," he sighed, "this is it." His eyes were gently closed; he lay on his back, drinking the sun. "You miss this," he said. He meant "on the Starship," of course. But he never said "the Starship" or mentioned the Starship and all the things you couldn't have on the Starship. You couldn't have a salt wind on the Starship or a blue sky or a yellow sun or Father's cooking. You couldn't talk to your fourteen-year-old boy on the Starship.

"Let's hear it,' he said at last. And I knew that now we would talk, as we had always talked, for three hours straight. All afternoon we would murmur back and forth in the lazy sun about my school grades, how high I could jump, how fast I could swim. Papa nodded each time I spoke, and sometimes he smiled or slapped my chest lightly in approval. We talked. We did not talk of Starships or space, but we talked of Mexico, where we had driven once in an ancient car, and of the butterflies we had caught in the rain forests of green warm Mexico at noon, seeing the hundred butterflies sucked to our radiator, dying there, beating their blue and crimson wings, twitching, beautiful, and sad. We talked of such things instead of the things I wanted to talk about. And he listened to me. That was the thing he did, as if he was trying to fill himself up with all the sounds he could hear. He listened to the wind and the falling ocean and my voice, always with a rapt attention, a concentration that almost excluded physical bodies themselves and kept only the sounds. He shut his eyes to listen. I would see him listening to the lawn mower as he cut the grass by hand instead of using the remote-control device, and I would see him smelling the cut grass as it sprayed up at him behind the mower in a green fount.

"Chris," he said, about five in the afternoon, as we were picking up our towels and heading back along the beach near the surf, "I want you to promise me something."

"What?"

"Don't ever join Starfleet."

I stopped.

"I mean it," he said. "Because when you're out there you want to be here, and when you're here you want to be out there. Don't start that. Don't let it get hold of you."

"But-"

"You don't know how it is. Every time I'm out there I think, If I ever get back to Earth I'll stay there; I'll never go out again. But I go out, and I guess I'll always go out."

"I've thought about joining Starfleet for a long time, Papa," I said.

He didn't seem to hear me. "I try to stay here. Last Saturday when I got home I started trying so damned hard to stay here." He dropped his head, and I pretended not to notice the tears that had gathered in the corners of his eyes.

I remembered him in the garden, sweating, and all the traveling and doing and listening, and I knew that he did this to convince himself that the sea and the towns and the land and his family were the only real things and the good things. But I knew where he would be tonight: looking at the jewelry in Orion from our front porch.

"Promise me you won't be like me," he said. I hesitated awhile. 

"Okay," I said.

He shook my hand. "Good boy," he said.

The dinner was fine that night. Father had whisked about the kitchen with his recipe books and carefully measured spoons of cinnamon and dough, with pots and pans tinkling, and now a great turkey fumed on the table, with dressing, cranberry sauce, peas, and pumpkin pie.

"In the middle of August?" said Papa, amazed.

"You won't be here for Thanksgiving." 

"So I won't."

Papa sniffed it. He lifted each lid from each tureen and let the flavor steam over his sunburned face. He said "Ah" to each. He looked at the room and his hands. He gazed at the pictures on the wall, the chairs, the table, me, and Father. He cleared his throat. I saw him make up his mind. "Spock?"

"Yes?" Father looked across the table which he had set like a wonderful silver trap, a miraculous gravy pit into which, like a struggling beast of the past caught in a tar pool, his husband might at last be caught and held, gazing out through a jail of wishbones, safe forever. His eyes sparkled.

"Spock," said Papa.

Go on, I thought crazily. Say it, quick; say you'll stay home this time, for good, and never go away; say it!

Just then a passing shuttle jarred the room and the window pane shook with a crystal sound. Papa glanced at the window. The blue stars of evening were there, and the red planet Mars was rising in the East. Papa looked at Mars a full minute. Then he put his hand out blindly toward me. "May I have some peas," he said.

"Excuse me," said Father. "I am going to get some bread."

He walked out into the kitchen.

"But there's bread on the table," I said.

Papa didn't look at me as he began his meal.

I couldn't sleep that night. I came downstairs at one in the morning and the moonlight was like ice on all the housetops, and dew glittered in a snow field on our grass. I stood in the doorway in my pajamas, feeling the warm night wind, and then I knew that Papa was sitting in the mechanical porch swing, gliding gently. I could see his profile tilted back, and he was watching the stars wheel over the sky. His eyes were like crystal there, the moon in each one.

I went out and sat beside him. We glided awhile in the swing. At last I said, "How many ways are there to die in space?"

"A million."

"Name some."

"The meteors hit you. The power dies in your life-support systems, and you asphyxiate. Or comets take you along with them. Or you run into a hostile alien vessel. Concussion. Strangulation. Explosion. Centrifugal force. Too much acceleration. Too little. The heat, the cold, the sun, the moon, the stars, the planets, the asteroids, the planetoids, radiation...."

"And do they bury you?"

"Son, sometimes they never even find you."

"So where do you go?"

"A billion miles away. Traveling graves, they call them. You become a meteor or a planetoid traveling forever through space."

I said nothing.

"One thing," he said later, "it's quick in space. Death. It's over like that. You don't linger. Most of the time you don't even know it. You're dead and that's it." We went up to bed.

Then it was morning. Standing in the doorway, Papa listened to the yellow canary singing in its golden cage. "Well, I've decided," he said. "Next time I come home, I'm home to stay."

"Papa!" I said.

"Tell your Father that when he gets up," he said.

"You mean it!"

He nodded gravely. "See you in about three months."

And there he went off down the street, carrying his uniform in its secret box, whistling and looking at the tall green trees and picking chinaberries off the chinaberry bush as he brushed by, tossing them ahead of him as he walked away into the bright shade of early morning...

I asked Father about a few things that morning after Papa had been gone a number of hours. "Papa said that sometimes you don't act as if you hear or see him," I said.

And then he explained everything to me quietly.

"When your Papa and I met, we were on a Starship. You know this. But the event of your adoption necessitated sacrifices. When Jim went back into space ten years ago, I said to myself, 'He is dead.' Or as good as dead. I had known him to be dead once before, many years ago, so I remembered his death then and accepted it as truth whenever he left for space. It is an illogical action, I admit, but the only way I can continue to be a good Father to you is to think of your Papa as dead. And when he comes back, three or four times a year, it is not him I see before me, it is only a memory or a dream. And if a memory stops or a dream stops, it cannot affect you. Therefore, most of the time, I think of him dead--"

"But other times--"

"Other times I fail to restrain myself. I bake pies and treat him as if he were alive, and then it hurts. No, Christopher, it is better to think that he has not been here for ten years and that I will never see him again. Then it does not hurt as much. I do not let it hurt."

"But didn't he say next time he'd settle down?"

He shook his head slowly. "No, he is dead. I am very sure of that."

"He'll come alive again, then," 1 said. 

"Ten years ago," said Father, "I thought, What if he dies on Venus? Then we will never be able to see Venus again. What if he dies on Mars? We will never be able to look at Mars again, all red in the sky, without wanting to go in and lock the door. Or what if he died on Jupiter or Saturn or Neptune? On those nights when those planets were high in the sky, we would not want to look at the stars, because they would bring us memories." 

"I guess not," I said.

The message came the next day.

The messenger gave it to me and I read it standing on the porch. The sun was setting. Father stood in the screen door behind me, watching me fold the message and put it in my pocket.

"Father," I said.

"Do not tell me anything I don't already know," he said.

He didn't cry.

Well, it wasn't Mars, and it wasn't Venus, and it wasn't Jupiter or Saturn that killed Papa. We wouldn't have to think of him every time Jupiter or Saturn or Mars lit up the evening sky.

This was different. His Starship had failed and it had fallen into the sun. And the sun was big and fiery and merciless, and it was always in the sky and you couldn't get away from it.

So for a long time after my Papa died, my Father slept through the days and wouldn't go out. We had breakfast at midnight and lunch at three in the morning, and dinner at the cold dim hour of 6 A. M. We went to all-night shows and went to bed at sunrise.

And, for a long time, the only days we ever went out to walk were the days when it was raining and there was no sun.


End file.
